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www.bl.uk/ramayana The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts By J.P. Losty The Rāmāyaṇa The Rāmāyaṇa or Story of Rāma is one of the two ancient Sanskrit epics of India and is traditionally attributed to the authorship of the sage Vālmīki. It is a tale of exile, struggle, loss and redemption that had assumed roughly the present shape of the central five books by the middle of the first millennium B.C. Rāma, prince of Ayodhyā, through his heroic feat of breaking the bow of the god Śiva, won the hand of the beautiful princess Sītā, but was exiled with her and his brother Lakṣmaṇa for fourteen years through the plotting of his stepmother. After many peaceful years in the forest, Sītā was carried off by the demon Rāvaṇa, King of Laṅkā, and Rāma gathered an army of monkeys and bears to search for her. The allies attacked Laṅkā, killed Rāvaṇa and rescued Sītā. In order to prove her chastity, Sītā underwent the fire ordeal, and was vindicated by the gods and restored to her husband. After the couple’s triumphant return to Ayodhyā, Rāma’s righteous rule (Rām-rājya) inaugurated a golden age for all mankind. During the next millennium the original five books became conflated into their present size of seven books and 24,000 verses, mainly through the addition of outer supplementary books. In addition to narrating the story of Rāma’s birth and childhood, and of Rāma and Sītā’s relationship after her rescue, these books also add a cosmic dimension to this ancient tale of the perennial battle between good and evil. The evil Rāvaṇa, himself semi-divine, had previously extracted a boon from the god Brahmā that made him invincible to all gods and divine beings — he had not thought it necessary to obtain protection against mere men or animals. In order to destroy him, Viṣṇu the Preserver god, who periodically comes to earth to intervene in the affairs of the world when the balance between good and evil has been upset, had to be born as a man and his only help could come from animals. Rāma, the perfect man, thereby became identified as an avatar of Viṣṇu, the seventh in the series of ten major avatars and the most important after Kṛṣṇa. What had originated as an oral epic of local northern significance shifted to encompass the whole of India and Sri Lanka, and Rāma’s struggle to rescue his wife became a metaphor for the destruction of evil and the final triumph of good. The seventh and last book tells the history of Rāvaṇa and the demons, and many of the key myths of Hinduism, before resuming the story with Rāma’s repudiation of Sītā on account of the gossip about her time spent in Rāvaṇa’s palace. Rāma abandoned her in the hermitage of Vālmīki in the forest where she gave birth to twin 1 www.bl.uk/ramayana The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts sons Lava and Kuśa. The boys grew up and met their father when chanting to him Vālmīki’s newly composed epic about his deeds. He realised who they were but his attempts at reconciliation with Sītā were frustrated. She prayed to the Earth Goddess to receive her if she had never thought of any man but Rāma, and she was swallowed up by the Earth. Rāma finally remembered his original divine status and resolved to resume his place in heaven as Viṣṇu. After leaving his kingdom to his twin sons he, his brothers and many of their helpers in the epic struggle entered the waters of the river Sarayū outside Ayodhyā and thereby ascended to heaven. Vālmīki’s work is more than an epic; it is also considered the first Sanskrit poem, the ādi-kāvya, since, he tells us, his words when moved by pity (śoka) at the fall of an amorous krauñca (love-bird) to a hunter’s arrow, fell naturally into a new verse-form (śloka). Moved by this death, he then went on to narrate the whole pitiful tale of Rāma and Sītā in this newly created metre. The epic’s poetic stature and marvellous story have moved India’s writers over two millennia to emulate Vālmīki. The story of Rāma was constantly retold in poetic versions by some of India’s greatest writers both in Sanskrit and the regional languages. It is also one of the staples of dramatic traditions, in court drama, and in dance-dramas and puppet or shadow-puppet theatres. In northern India the annual Rām-līla or ‘Rāma-play’ is performed at the great autumn festival of Dasehra to celebrate with Rāma and Sītā the eventual triumph of light over darkness. Bards still tour the towns and villages of India to recite and improvise on the vernacular versions, often with the help of painted scrolls or painted story boxes. The story was carved in frieze form on the plinths of temples and numerous illustrated manuscripts of it survive from the sixteenth century onwards. Nor is the story confined to the Indian sub-continent. At a very early date (mid-first millennium B.C.) a version of it is found in the Daśaratha Jātaka, one of the jātakas or stories about the previous births of the Buddha which form part of the Buddhist Hinayana canon. The Theravada version in Pālī travelled to Sri Lanka while a lost Sanskrit version of the jātaka from one of the other Hinayana schools was translated into Chinese in the first millennium A.D. and forms part of the Chinese Buddhist canon. In all these versions the story is transformed into a vehicle for lauding various Buddhist ideals. Independent versions also exist in Tibetan and Khotanese known from manuscripts found in the cave library at Dunhuang that conform more to the Indian original. The story travelled in the first millennium A.D. both in its original version and in its Buddhist version to the various Hindu or Buddhist kingdoms of South-east Asia, along with many other features of Indian culture. Reliefs of the story were carved on temple walls in Java and Cambodia. Even after the coming of Islam, versions of the tale were written in Javanese and Malay and the story was retold through the drama, the dance and the shadow puppet-theatre, while it remained central to the life of Hindu Bali. The story was adopted wholeheartedly in Thailand, whose 2 www.bl.uk/ramayana The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts old capital Ayutthya, founded in 1347, was modelled on Ayodhyā, while various new versions were composed, often by royal authors, since at least the fifteenth century. New versions of the story were also written as poems and dramas in Burmese, Thai, Cambodian, and Laotian. All of these versions change parts of the story significantly to reflect their different customs and cultures, as well as to emphasise Rāma’s Buddhist virtues. The extraordinary prowess of the monkeys who helped Rāma made people credit them with supernatural powers. They were thought of as sons of the gods. Of all the monkeys who helped Rāma recover Sītā, it was the son of the Wind-god, the faithful and resourceful Hanumān, of immense strength and agility, who took most hold in the popular imagination. He became the archetype of the faithful friend and metal and stone images of him are common. Paintings of him standing respectfully before Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā or proudly leading a regal Rāma on horseback encapsulate the whole story of the Rāmāyaṇa. He is often found alone in popular art, carrying the mountain of magic herbs, or wrestling with Rāvaṇa, or bearing Rāma and Sītā on his heart. In India he remained wise, heroic and indeed saintly, but in South-east Asia where he is also the most popular character in the story, he became representative of all the freer aspects of life. In the South-east Asian versions Hanumān’s adventures are considerably elaborated: while crossing over the bridge to Laṅkā he took time off to dally with the Fish-Princess in the ocean and the result was a son, a monkey with the tail of a fish. Rāma and Sītā are two names that are entwined together in Indian life. Their story of an ideal marriage, of Rāma as the heroic husband who moves mountains to rescue his wife, and of Sītā as his faithful partner, constant in adversity, has struck deep into the Indian psyche. Their presence imparts blessings and fertility on every marriage, while their conjoined name ‘Sītā-Rāma’ is one of the most common of Indian personal names. Rāma became the ideal both of manhood and of kingship, in his devotion to duty, in his self-command under intense suffering, and in his conception of righteous kingship. Hindu temples were decorated with relief panels illustrating the story. Such carvings on temples under royal patronage consciously evoked Rāma, the ruler of Ayodhyā in mankind’s golden age, and were used both in India and in South-east Asia to confer divine legitimacy on their patron’s rule. In later centuries in south India textiles painted or printed in many registers with the details of Rāma’s story were used instead of carved relief panels. Other textiles concentrating on the epic struggle between Rāma and Rāvaṇa were exported to the Muslim sultanates of Indonesia to be used in court ceremonies as symbols of royal legitimacy. The Hindu doctrine of avatars was developed to explain divine intervention in the affairs of the world when the balance between good and evil had been upset. To 3 www.bl.uk/ramayana The Mewar Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts Vālmīki, Rāma was the perfect man; it is the two later books of the epic which explain the theological implications of Rāma as the seventh avatar of Viṣṇu.

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